10 May 2011

Dana Wynter (1931 -- 2011)
An actress who was in over 20 films and 60 television shows (not counting being a series regular on one or two) died recently. She was the last of the surviving stars of her best known film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a low-budget, but highly effective adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 serialized novel from Collier's Magazine, "The Body Snatchers."

The first paragraph of her Los Angeles Times obituary wastes no time putting Wynter in PC perspective:

Dana Wynter, best known for her role in 'Body Snatchers,' appeared in numerous TV and film projects. The science-fiction film became a cult classic partly because of its 'McCarthy-era subtext," film critic Leonard Maltin wrote.

What "McCarthy-era" subtext are we talking about? I've seen this movie a dozen times. I know the original story. I also know the history of Senator Joseph (shudder) McCarthy.

First, one must assume one knows what a McCarthy-era subtext could be. For the left, Senator Joseph McCarthy symbolizes The House Committee on un-American Activities (which morphed in the 1970s into the House Judiciary Committee which is still in business). The HCUA held hearings on Hollywood's supposed involvement with communist propaganda that might have been in a few WWII films. Ten Hollywood types refused to cooperate with these hearings and were shunned by the studios.

It doesn't matter that Joseph McCarthy had nothing to do with HCUA nor with the Hollywood blacklist. But he was a major anti-communist and for the left there's nothing worse (they even have trouble forgiving JFK for this cardinal sin).

Oh, I should mention that there was a "Red Scare" going on when Invasion of the Body Snatchers frightened Jim and Jane America. Well "Scare" is the leftist term. Let's call it what it was: a healthy concern that a government system (communism) that was 10 times more lethal than fascism and was being spread around the world by brute force wanted to spread its thorns into the USA. Silly America. Next they'll be "scared" of Radical Islam.

The film does have the scent of politics, but it isn't anti-Communism. The Times article quotes Wynter:

Wynter told Weaver in a 1999 interview for Starlog magazine: "It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture. That was what Allied Artists thought they were making.… We realized … that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-ism — fascism, communism, all that kind of thing. We took it for granted that's what we were making but it wasn't spoken about openly on the set or anything like that."

Fascism? Check. Communism? Check. But McCarthyism? The Times must have imagined Wynter's quote was "Naturally, we were making a film that showed the evils of anti-communism and what a demon Senator McCarthy was, but then, this was before Nixon or Reagan or the Tea Party."

The left does not see the murder of 100,000,000 people as anything more than a necessary loss on the road to political paradise. But a "Red Scare"? That's something they will never get over. And if your classic sci-fi film doesn't have a "'McCarthy-era subtext," theyll just pretend it does. That's just how they roll.

"A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end Capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of Communism." (Saul Alinksy, Rules for Radicals, 1971)

"Run Honey. We're being chased by historical revisionist!"

For more on the truth about America's easily led communist supporters, read Paul Kengor's DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century [Hardcover]

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed.
If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869

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